While writing the section of my 2026 Python Packaging Council (PPC) nomination on secure supply chain, I realized that one thing related to having a secure supply chain that we lack is a defined way to perform reproducible builds . The reason I like the idea of making reproducible builds work is that I think it can be done in such a way as to not require any work on the part of the producer of a distribution (which is a technical term for sdists or wheels , i.e., the people who upload stuf...

Like most programming languages, Go has both stack allocations, whose lifetime is limited to the current function, and dynamic (or heap) allocations. The name stack comes from the fact that the memory management is somewhat trivial. There is typically one stack per thread (or goroutine in Go). When a function needs memory, it simply appends data to the stack. When the function returns, the memory is dropped from the end of the stack. So the memory last allocated is deallocated first. Heap me...

Setting up the test foundations using Testcontainers and transactions for AI-enabled applications with C# and .NET Setting up the test foundations using Testcontainers and transactions for AI-enabled applications with C# and .NET

This is part 7 in a series of posts on writing concurrent network servers. In this part, we discuss how the challenges described in earlier parts are tackled in the Rust programming language. All posts in the series: Part 1 - Introduction Part 2 - Threads Part 3 - Event-driven Part 4 - libuv Part 5 - Redis case study Part 6 - Callbacks, Promises and async/await Part 7 - Rust (this part) Several years have passed since the previous parts were published. I've recently went ov...

I am converting the notes for “Managing Research Software Projects” from McCole to Quarto. Most of the changes have gone smoothly, but I’m stuck on a few things and would appreciate guidance. For reference, the materials are in this repository and you can view the rendered version here . The landing page shows the contents of index.qmd (which is good) but that page shows up as entry #1 in the table of contents (which is bad). I have tried using a # Title heading in in...

Craft launched from Luna, no tether can go farther, faster while being lighter Exploring more worlds with joy and curiosity hosting ideas, deploying empathy and even skepticism for humanity From the edge of a gravitational well they can push the discourse and shape its course All of these futures can bloom with the fervor and fragrance of you. Illustration of a rocket taking off from a Moonbase. Image: SpaceX Poem notes: I love writing poetry where words allude to technical space themes. It...

See the previous post for context and explanation of SSI . After reading Chris Fallin’s aegraph post , new ZJIT contributor dak2 landed a block-local version of the canonicalize function in #16828 . The pseudocode of the block-local canonicalize function looks like this: for block in function . reverse_post_order (): rewrite_map = {} for insn in block . insns : insn . operands . map_in_place ( lambda o : rewrite_map . get ( o , o )) ...

In the month of April my car was in the shop three times. It was supposed to be one trip (O2 sensor, emissions, tires), but it wound up being divided into three because of some unavailability on my part and the mechanics’, combined with a slight delay on parts I ordered. Anyway, I got it back and figured I’d be done with that stuff for a bit. Within 24 hours I was jacking it up to see if a wheel bearing was bad, and within 48 hours I was riding back in a tow truck. In the month of April my ...

People are pretty unhappy about Anthropic’s recent announcement that they’re planning to include a hidden watermark in Claude model outputs. Will this lead to a mass exodus from Anthropic models? Will the introduction of watermarking be a meaningful change for users? No. AI text watermarking is not a big deal. It doesn’t make the text worse, it doesn’t make AI outputs more detectable in practice, it doesn’t violate user privacy, and everyone’s going to be doing it by 2027 reg...

Uber’s platform recorded 3.87 billion trips in the three months to June 2026. Yet the Federal Reserve found that 70% of Americans who did gig work spent under five hours a week on it. That gap defines the sector. This page collects gig economy statistics on participation, hours, demographics, platform scale and freelance pay, each with its source and measurement period. Gig Economy Statistics 20% of US adults did gig work in the month before the Federal Reserve’s October 2024 survey....

Accidental breakage can happen in any codebase . The Rust standard library isn't magically exempt from this — so it too now uses cargo-semver-checks to prevent accidental breakage . Here's why this took months of work by multiple Rustaceans, dozens of pull requests, and 15,000+ lines of code across the Rust repo, cargo-semver-checks , and its component libraries. Accidental breakage can happen in any codebase . The Rust standard library isn't magically exempt from this — so it too n...

In some ways, we know aging when we see it, from the graying of hair to the wrinkling of skin to declines in motor, sensory, and cognitive capacities. Yet the underlying biology of aging remains a matter of uncertainty and debate. Many lines of research align with the theory that aging is a direct result of decay — the inevitable degradation of molecules (including proteins or DNA), organelles… Source In some ways, we know aging when we see it, from the graying of hair to the wrinkling of...

While I was developing tooling for my job this weekend, I found a few blogposts that I don't remember writing: Advice for staying in the hospital for a week The Unbound Scepter Using Clankers to Help Me Process Surgery Checking the date range, they coincide with when I was in the hospital earlier this year . I have removed them from the blog index and plan to rewrite them from scratch in my own words when I have the time. I a...

Printing Lists Aug 14, 2026 To print a comma-separated list, a concise idiom is to optionally print the comma first, before the element: for (items, 0 ..) | item, item_index | { if (item_index > 0 ) std.debug.print( ", " ); std.debug.print( "{}" , .{item}); } Printing Lists Aug 14, 2026 To print a comma-separated list, a concise idiom is to optionally print the comma first, before the element: for (items, 0 ..) | item, item_index | {...

Notes from 13 sessions on evals, context, and systems. 9.5 hours of talks distilled into about 20 minutes of reading. Notes from 13 sessions on evals, context, and systems. 9.5 hours of talks distilled into about 20 minutes of reading.

Something I’ve noticed recently is that I am no longer able to read and parse PR titles and descriptions across the internet. I don’t think I stopped being able to read or understand code, but now that we are automatically generating more and more explanatory artifacts instead of writing them, navigating codebases as a human is becoming an exercise in futility. I’m not the only one: We are already constantly drowning in tech jargon, much of which comes to us presented through brea...

I was holding off on discussing this until I had all my machines upgraded, but I think the news is worthy enough to mention in the interim. Everyone’s favourite OS hit version 11 at the end of July, and it’s an awesome release. These are the highlights from the release notes , emphasis added: New port to the RISC-V processor architecture. NetBSD 11.0 is the first stable release to include support for 64-bit RISC-V platforms, including a range of StarFive JH71XX-based devices such...

Fishing for Souls, by Adriaen van de Venne, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at home price declines, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, The Boring Company’s $4 billion fundraise, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing and Cities California is still not building enough housing. “ After years of n...

0.0 Context Setting Friday, 14 August 2026 in Portland, Oregon, pretty much straight after finishing a live show. I’ve got a full day and this is an attempt at getting a newsletter out in a respectable amount of time without overloading people with words. Short is definitely better sometimes. 0.1 Events The next How People Work, Live! ... with Marcin Wichary is on Friday 21 August at 9am Pacific. You should register for it . Here’s Marcin’s bio: Marcin Wichary started his career ...

The National Gallery of Scotland has a temporary exhibition of Stanley Cursiter ’s artwork going on at the moment. Cursiter was both an artist and keeper (which I understand to be like a curator), later director, of the National Gallery of Scotland. The exhibition, in one of the side rooms to the main hall, is filled with a selection of works throughout his career. Walking through the room, I was surprised and delighted by the range of his works. I liked his “ Synthesis of the Supper Room a...

This blog is the first in a series exploring the technologies and principles shaping the future of AI and autonomy. In a contested environment, yesterday’s software is rarely enough for tomorrow’s mission. Autonomy has to be adaptable by the operator as the mission changes. Historically, changing how an autonomous system behaves has meant changing its software. An operator identifies a gap, then engineers modify the code, retest, recertify as required, and redeploy. The process exists for...

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Fiction Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino . Beautiful prose and imagination. By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño . Beautiful and surreal prose, but completely unpretentious. Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories by qntm . I had already read most of these but they are very, very good, and it was a pleasure to read them again. ⭐️ Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman . Usually when I hear “it’s a 900 page Russian epic about three generations of a family living throu...